Our View: A refill for Rhodes Pond; who's running elections?

Friday

Aug 11, 2017 at 5:08 PM

Merit: For the federal and state agencies that have found funding to replace the badly damaged Rhodes Pond dam in northeastern Cumberland County.

The dam was breached by flooding from a tropical storm in 2013. Reconstruction was about half completed last fall when Hurricane Matthew struck. Rains from the hurricane washed out a 50 to 60 foot section of dam and created several smaller breaches as well.

This week, the state Wildlife Resources Commission, which owns the historic pond and dam, announced that it's getting $6.4 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to replace the dam. The state will pay the remainder of the $8.75 million cost of the work. The pond is on U.S. 301 near Godwin. It has long been a popular fishing and bird-watching spot and the occasional alligator has been spotted there. Dams on the Black River to create what was originally a mill pond date back to around 1740. The pond, when restored, will cover about 460 acres.

And a special merit for state Rep. John Szoka, who has long sought funding to repair the dam and has worked with state and federal officials to get it done.

Demerit: For the political squabbles in Raleigh that have left the Cumberland County Board of Elections powerless. With local elections coming this fall, the board is unable to set policy, settle disputes or otherwise act in any way.

The local board has had only two members since James Baker resigned in February. But a law passed last December increased local board of elections membership from three to four. With only two members, Cumberland's board can't get a quorum. Gov. Roy Cooper has filed suit against the law, saying it's unconstitutional. And he's refused to appoint new members in the interim. This has rendered the Cumberland board and a few others useless.

The N.C. Supreme Count has schedule arguments in Cooper's suit for Aug. 28. We hope the court reaches a quick decision, because we could have some awful electoral messes in October primary and November election without a board of elections. Complaints or electoral infractions will have to be heard in courts instead of before the board of elections.

Merit: For all the people who stepped up to become volunteer step-parents for Nellie, the pit bull who was injured and then lost after a fatal accident on I-95 in Cumberland County. The one-vehicle crash took the life of Nellie's owner, William Schlesinger, who was driving home to Virginia from Florida. Nellie jumped out Schlesinger's truck and spent 10 days lost in a wooded area. Local people and Schlesinger's friends from the D.C. area scoured the area for her, but were unable to find her. After 10 days, Nellie came out of the woods and wandered up to a convenience store, where one of the customers figured out who she was. She was covered with bug bites and had a broken left hind leg.

The "miracle dog" was taken in at Cross Creek Animal Hospital in Fayetteville, where she got surgery to repair her leg. She also had regular visits from some of the searchers who had looked for her, and when it was time for her to leave, some brought her gifts. The animal hospital staff, which fell in love with Nellie, posed with her for a group photo before she left for Virginia with her new owner, Schlesinger's sister, Clara.

Dogs really do bring out the best in the humans around them.

Demerit: For the hackers who have been targeting factories with "ransomware," shutting down their computer systems with a software virus and demanding a steep payment to "unlock" the company's hostage computers. An Associated Press story on Thursday told the story of AW North Carolina, a Durham plant that builds automobile transmissions. The company's computer-driven production system was shut down last August by hackers, and it happened again in April, when new crooks tried to introduce a different malware into the company's computers. Fortunately, AW had pretty good firewalls and was able to contain the trouble without having to pay a ransom, although the company did lose production time.

There's a message there for all of us, from casual laptop users all the way up to big corporations: Equip your computers with the best anti-virus software and firewalls you can find, and make sure you quickly install any security upgrades for the software you're running. Don't ignore those upgrade messages — yes, they're annoying and usually arrive when you don't have the time to spare for them. But do it anyway. It's a nasty cyber world out there.

Merit or Demerit: We're not sure which. But we can't sign off today without expressing astonishment over the many ways that a Southern institution, moonshining, lives on in this high-tech world. By all rights, mooshine should have gone away when Prohibition ended. But it endures. There are still plenty of stills out there in the woods and plenty of people who will sell you a Mason jar of hooch.

That apparently includes two South Carolina residents who were arrested in Bladen County this week as they allegedly delivered eight quarts of moonshine to an undercover Alcohol Law Enforcement agent. The duo drove up to Elizabethtown from a small town northwest of Myrtle Beach to deliver several different flavors of moonshine.

And here's the amazing part: Like so many other people these days, they were running their illegal business through their Facebook account. Apparently, quite a few Facebook users complained to law enforcement about them. More proof that fancy new technology isn't necessarily a good route to criminal success.

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